Menu

Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, screened at the 73rd Venice Film Festival, looks at the interconnected histories of a Canadian mining town and the birth of cinema. From the 1890’s to the early 20th century, at around the same time as the birth of the invention of cinema, a gold rush began in this…

Gonzalo Delgado and Verónica Perrota co-direct, co-write and act in Dolphins Go East, a dysfunctional family comedy-drama from Uruguay presented in the main competition of the 16th Transilvania International Film Festival. Virginia (Perrota), the quasi-estranged daughter of an outrageously gay and pathetically fading show-biz personality, Miguel Angel Garcia Mazziotti (Jorge Denevi), shows up at his…

An awkward dinner scene introduces the heavily repressed family unit of Quit Staring at My Plate, Hana Jušić’s feature screened at the Venice Days section of the 73rd Venice Film Festival. Father (Niksa Butijer) is an authoritarian and unappealing patriarch. He shouts, threatens, and bullies everyone, including his mentally disabled son for not being able…

The Farthest is a beautiful, insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking documentary about the 1977 launch of the Voyager space probes. Their primary mission was to study the Solar System; it included flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Having completed this, they began an extended one to explore the regions and boundaries of the outer heliosphere and…

According to a Svaneti tradition, a historic province of Georgia, a widow must marry the first man who asks her hand. This retrograde mentality is the subject of Dede, directed by Mariam Khatchavani. The film won the Special Jury Prize of the East of the West competition of the 52nd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.…

A Young Girl in Her Nineties, presented at the 16th Transilvania International Film Festival, is the new documentary by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Yann Coridian. The film confronts its viewers with the vulnerabilities of aging and, more directly, with the vulnerabilities to which we expose ourselves when we fall in love. Blanche, the film’s protagonist,…

Historically, Three Live Ghosts is a film of great interest. Firstly, it was directed by George Fitzmaurice. Secondly, it is the earliest surviving film that Alfred Hitchcock worked on. Thirdly, its cast featured Edmund Goulding, who later became an acclaimed filmmaker, and was shot by cinematographer Arthur Miller, who worked with him throughout the 40’s.…